


light in a hopeless place.

by foundCarcosa



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-02-28
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post-apocalyptic AU reminiscent of <em>The Stand</em> and <em>The Book of Eli</em>, where Sebastian Vael tries to keep a virus-ridden Fenris alive with dreams of a cure that doesn't exist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	light in a hopeless place.

The worst thing about it was the sunlight.  
For hours the sun blazed incessantly in a cloudless, expansive sky, and the sands burned under their feet. Fenris had snapped his fingers at Sebastian and pointed to the extra pair of shoes dangling from his pack, and Sebastian had tried to crack a knowing smile but his lips were too dry. _I knew you’d come through sooner or later._

It wasn’t as difficult for Fenris to scowl in response. The expression had been seared onto his face, just like how the unnatural sickness in his veins made them stand out in such stark relief that he looked like a roadmap of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, which, if the transistor radio was to be believed, was no more.

Sebastian hunkered behind the hollowed-out carcass of a Chevy, raking his hair away from his dripping forehead with a heavy sigh. Fenris did the same, but his hand came away with a few grey-white strands clinging to the blistered fingers.  
He hurriedly shook them away and shoved his hands between his knees, but Sebastian’s eyes missed very little.

“We’ll get to the outpost,” he said softly. “I swear to God we will.”

“To hell with your god,” Fenris responded automatically, gravelly voice sharp.

“I’m not letting you rot out here, Fenris. I made a promise to you—”

Sebastian’s words were interrupted by a loud hacking sound. Fenris turned his head, spat. The bone-dry sand drank up the phlegmatic offering in the matter of a second. “How long ago was that? Before the virus even spread? Before the evacuations? Before Garrett and And--”

Sometimes it was harder than other times, when his throat clamped shut before the words could even be spoken. Under the fringe of thinning hair, his eyes burned with more than just sickness — _they called it Lyridium, and it was supposed to be a godsend, it was supposed to be a cure, but they didn’t know anything, they didn’t know a damned thing_ — and Sebastian squeezed his shoulder briefly before pushing to his feet.

“We can make a couple more miles before meal break.”

“Why bother,” Fenris muttered as he humped his pack and trudged after the man, but he wasn’t talking about the walking.

—

The desert was endless, but Sebastian’s will was indomitable, too-blue eyes still shining even in the dead of night, hands clasped under a scruffy chin as he thanks some nameless entity for the fact that they were still alive.

Still alive, in a world that’s already begun to die.

Fenris followed him because every day his veins burned with greater intensity, because every day he was brought to his knees by fits of hacking coughs, because every day the relentless sun warped the synapses in his already-tainted brain and gave him terrible visions — great winged creatures beating the sand with their scaled wings, mostly, these days — because every day he turned greyer and his hair hung thinner and limper and he knew that if he couldn’t mutate, couldn’t become like how Anders had become just before Garrett had to put him down like a rabid dog, then he would die with awareness, terrible awareness.

“I hate scientists,” and Sebastian hated them too, but more than that he pitied them for turning their gaze from their Creator, and though Fenris spat upon Sebastian’s God the way he spat phlegm and blood upon the sands every day, he clung to the fact that they agreed on something.  
That they both knew who had made the world this way. That they both knew why they were doomed to wander a post-apocalyptic desert in search of a distant outpost that may or may not be there, a cure that may or may not exist.

Sebastian tried to convince Fenris that he cared about him. Fenris wouldn’t hear it. “The sun addles everyone,” and that was that.  
Fenris was Sebastian’s project. His redemption song. Fenris held no illusions.

“I think I see it!” Sebastian crowed, and Fenris, unable to help himself, cuffed Sebastian on the back of the head.

“You flaming idiot,” he seethed, and then sank into a crouch as coughs racked his frail frame. His eyes brimmed with tears from the exertion as he gasped out, “That’s… a fucking… _apartment_ complex.”

“A city,” Sebastian said dreamily, the base of his skull throbbing dully from being struck, but going unnoticed. “There could be people there.”

“For your sake, you’d better hope there aren’t.”

Later, Fenris muttered a half-hearted apology for striking Sebastian, but Sebastian just wrapped the dingy, thin, rat-chewed blanket around them and closed his eyes.  
Fenris thinks he might be wearing Sebastian thin.  
 _Well, you piece-of-shit virus, if you’re going to take me, take me soon. You hear me? Take me soon._

—

“The outpost doesn’t fucking exist.”

Fenris had collapsed a few steps behind Sebastian, and he hadn’t noticed at first. He’d rushed back, dripping sweat onto Fenris’ burning face as he leaned over him.  
Fenris closed his eyes and shook his head, pushing away the man’s anxious hands.

“Do you hear me? The outpost. Doesn’t. Exist.”

“That’s the sickness talking. You know better. It was on the—”

“I don’t care what the radio said. If the Kirkwall branch went lousy with infection, what makes you fucking think the Starkhaven branch wouldn’t, too?  
It’s over, Sebastian. I’m tired of you dragging me over this endless desert. I’m… tired.”

“I’m supposed to save you,” he whispered, plaintively, and Fenris’ sneer warped his sallow features.

“Save yourself. Have you looked in a mirror lately?  
Leave me. If you care so much, let me fucking _die,_ damn you.”

“Fenris…”

“Hey.”  
There was an uncommon softness to the man’s cheese-grater voice, and Sebastian leaned in, hanging onto it as if it were the last drop of water in the canteen.  
“Remember what Garrett said? Remember the pretty little scientist girl he was crazy about for a while — Mary or Merry or whatever the fuck her name was?  
Remember when he said he'd found light in a hopeless place?”

Later, Sebastian cursed the dehydration that weakened him as he lifted the waif-thin body in his arms, swaddled in the thin, ratty blanket they’d shared night after night. The fact that he couldn’t shed a single tear felt worse than anything else.

Vehicle carcasses littered the landscape more often now, and it wasn’t difficult for Sebastian to find one that still had its seats somewhat intact. He laid Fenris out in it. Smoothed his hair away from his head. Didn’t care that his hand came away with grey-white strands still clinging to it.  
The scavengers were all dead, too — no maggots, no more rats, not even the hardy cockroaches and their kin.  
Maybe somewhere along the line, someone else would come along and find this dessicated corpse, so carefully swaddled, so carefully placed. Maybe they’d know he was loved, and leave him be.

 _“Save yourself,”_ he’d growled, _"have you looked in a mirror lately?"_ and later that night, as Sebastian attempted to hunker down in a shadowy, dusty shell of a school bus, he looked down at his hands, and wasn’t surprised to see the veins beginning to stand out in stark relief.

There _was_ no outpost.  
Even Sebastian knew it. Without someone to hold hope for, there was no point in being deluded.

The next night, he found the pickup truck in which he’d left Fenris.

He climbed in next to him, gathered the body in his arms, said a silent prayer to commend both their souls to their creator, and waited for sleep.


End file.
